I have strong appreciation of diatom slides, radiolarian slides which I purchased from Stephano's lab in Italy. Please give a look to this microscoppists lab for your needs...price point is very sweet! Charlie guevara

I got my 8 form test plate and it looks very interesting, I only wanted it to test objectives but now I want to make my own diatom slides. It just looks so appealing somehow. I also checked the Italian website and it sounds very professional.

Wes wrote:I got my 8 form test plate and it looks very interesting, I only wanted it to test objectives but now I want to make my own diatom slides. It just looks so appealing somehow. I also checked the Italian website and it sounds very professional.

Is there a good starting guide to cleaning and mounting diatoms?

There are zillion starting points. But it mostly dependes on working safely with chemicals, some of them are hazardous. It is easily done if you are not a perfectionist. Forum members Charles and rnabholz presented beautiful detailed posts about them in 2016/2017. Look for "Doing diatoms" and "doing diatoms a different way" threads.

The photo of the Navicula is beautiful, please provide details - what microscope, objectives, illumination etc. Thanks in advance.

Hi Wes,
classic diatom cleaning methods involve the use of concentrated sulfuric and nitric acid and hydrogenperoxide. If you are an old lab rat and use stuff like this to clean your dishes - no problem. If you don't know why these chemicals are harder to get today - better stay away. It is also a question of life circumstances. Whith children or other causes of turbulences in the houshold (like the mother of the children ) it is much less safe than if you have a tidy chemical lab with a lab vent and where everything has it's place.
Hobbyst46 and I wrote a couple of posts about diatom cleaning with several halfway safe methods in the near past. Here you can download a presentation in german language I used to present the topic of easy diatom cleaning at a group meeting: http://www.mikrohamburg.de/Programm/Pro ... 170917.pdf
The conclusion so far is for me that you have to make compromises when you want to stay away from the hard methods, but that they should be good enough for many amateurs.

Many thanks everyone for pointing me to the threads and guides. I have some idea of lab safety rules and working with dangerous stuff like radioactive materials and strong acids so I can try a few different things.

Thanks Hobbyst46, this was done with my Phomi using the Zeiss Jena 40/0.95 apo objective with an unmatched Zeiss West 63/1.4 DIC slider (the combo works but results in a strong gradient)

MicroBob wrote:Whith children or other causes of turbulences in the houshold (like the mother of the children )

That gave me a good laugh Moving the Phomi with its enormous footprint to its current location resulted in a dramatic exchange with my wife (things cooled down after I showed her a how amazing diatoms and protozoans are).